Category Archives: Product News

It’s been almost a week since we announced the new version of SoundCloud and opened it up to the web. Thanks so much for taking the time to write in, leave comments, and record voice messages with your thoughts. We’ve been listening to the feedback we’ve received from you, our community, and are working hard to address the points raised. We realize we could have communicated better and will improve this in the future. If you’ve not heard back from us directly, it’s because of the sheer volume of suggestions and comments we’ve received (over 60,000 since the beta started!) We hear you loud and clear.

We’ve often been asked how to build an audience and be heard on SoundCloud. To help with this, we focused on improving the listener experience, making discovery and sharing faster and easier with Search, Sets and Reposts, bringing larger audiences to you and your sounds.

Now that we’ve launched the new SoundCloud, we’re bringing our focus back to the points raised by you: improved Spotlight and profile presentation, more visible Groups, clearer Sets, interactive comments, and more.

In the past few days we’ve already deployed some improvements based on feedback (increased visibility of Groups, tweaked suggested users, restored 5 Spotlight items), and will continue to be making further changes over the coming days and weeks. One of the benefits of new SoundCloud is that it allows us to be much more agile and flexible with developments.

While we’re working on these changes, you can revert back to Classic SoundCloud for now by clicking on ‘More’ in the top right corner of page and then ‘Switch back to Classic SoundCloud’.

Keep an eye on our blog and Twitter feed for updates. Thanks again for letting us know what you think.

Thanks to your feedback through months of private beta, we’re thrilled to be making a big announcement: today, the Next SoundCloud becomes SoundCloud for everyone.

What you hear and see today is the direct result of your input: this is your SoundCloud. For creators of music & audio like you, it means that you’ll be heard everywhere. For your friends, fans and followers, the new SoundCloud will make discovering, connecting and sharing sounds even easier and more fun.

It’s much more than just a redesign. Not only does SoundCloud look completely different, it has many exciting new features for you:

Reposts:

Grow your audience by seeing your sounds shared across the community, or build a following around your excellent taste by reposting sounds into your own stream for others to discover.

Sets:

Curate a collection with your own sounds or the sounds you love — it’s simple. Sets can be reposted and shared throughout the community, which will help you find new people to hear and share your sounds.

Continuous Play:

Hit play and continue exploring: keep listening while you discover even more music & audio. It’s seamless.

Search & Explore:

Find it, hear it: our improved search lets you find the music & audio you’re looking for. Not sure what you want? Explore lets you discover what’s new and hot.

And there’s more: the new SoundCloud is filled with tons of smaller details that we hope will make your experience better. You’ll see that we’ve improved timed comments and added keyboard shortcuts and a shuffle feature for the sounds you’ve liked. The new Activity tab keeps you informed about what’s happening around your music & audio in real time and a personalized ‘who to follow’ lists helps you find people like you.

This is only the beginning: in the coming weeks, we’ll be working on all areas of the web and mobile apps so that you can enjoy SoundCloud as a cross-platform experience.

On that note, we want to thank you not only for your help during the beta, but for making SoundCloud what it is: a fantastic community of sound creators and lovers where positive spirit, mutual respect and support has made this community one that you can all be proud of. Thank you. Stay awesome!

As always, we love your feedback: leave a comment to tell us what you like most about the new SoundCloud.

Our mobile apps let anyone record and share sounds on the go, and (just quietly) we think they’re pretty great. But we’ve spent a lot of time understanding how you use them to record everything from interviews to rehearsals, and worked hard to deliver a killer set of features that put even more power in your hands.

Pause for thought

We’ve added Pause & Resume so that recordings can be started, stopped and continued as many times as needed. This is great for recording longer segments of audio, or working around interruptions.

The essence of your sound

With the new trim feature, you can capture the essence of a sound by correcting mistakes and cutting unwanted sections from your recordings. Any time the recording is paused, simply drag the sliders in from the edges of the waveform to trim your sound down to the part you want to keep. If something interrupts your sound recording, it’s now simple to remove the offending section and continue the recording.

Trim is also useful when you’re waiting for a special moment (e.g. an announcement, the chimes of a bell, the roar of a crowd when a point is scored at a sports game, etc.). You can now start a recording and leave it running until the special moment occurs, then trim away the rest, leaving the most relevant sound ready for sharing.

Broadcast journalist Neal Augenstein, who exclusively uses his phone to record and edit his work, had a sneak preview of these new features and had this to say about them:

“So far I’m digging the new SoundCloud iPhone app. The trimming feature is (not surprisingly for SoundCloud) well thought out, and easy to use. They keep improving the product, making it easier for me to do my job.”

Fade in, Fade out on Android

Android users can take advantage of a useful new fade in/out filter… apply this effect to loud recordings to achieve a smoother start and ending.

Forgotten your earphones? Introducing Private Listening…

On the iPhone, we added a feature we call ‘Private Listening’: when you’re playing sounds through the loudspeaker, simply hold the handset up to your ear as if you were taking a phone call and the audio will be re-routed to the phone speaker. Private listening is ideal for listening to private messages, or for sneaking a listen to some great new sounds without letting others know what you’re hearing.

If you already have the SoundCloud app installed, you will be able to update it today. If not, what are you waiting for? You can download it from the Apple App Store or Google Play.